Transcriber: Zsofia Gocze Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So, mindfulness is a way to train your attention
using your ordinary senses and perceptions.
Maybe you've heard about it.
There's this explosion of research that's validating its many benefits:
the way it helps people manage stress,
reduce their anxiety,
and even sleep better.
I was skeptical about these claims
because I have kind of a natural talent for stress.
(Laughter)
One time, I was stressed out on vacation
after a massage
(Laughter)
at a hot springs spa resort.
And I kept thinking
how I wanted to take a picture of this place
because it would help me relax
when I got back to the job I was dreading returning to.
So, that gives you an idea of what I was up against,
but I decided I'm going to give this mindfulness a try.
So I've been practicing every day for 13 years.
And
I noticed that it started to quietly transform
the way I was living my life
when I stopped trying to get the outcomes I was hoping for
and instead
put my attention on doing the exercises required to get there.
It reminded me what I already knew about physical fitness.
If you take the stairs
and you notice your heart starts to beat faster,
maybe your legs start to burn,
you don't say to yourself,
"Oh, I must be taking the stairs wrong."
Right?
(Laughter)
You say, "This is what taking the stairs feels like."
And if we always take the elevator
in order to save time and avoid discomfort,
we just miss opportunities for developing our physical health.
And it's the same thing.
It works the same way.
So many people try mindfulness
and they're convinced they're doing it wrong,
so they give up.
And they miss an opportunity
to change their relationship with discomfort.
And if you expect your everyday life
to be free of discomfort and confusion,
you're going to spend all your energy worrying,
trying not to feel what you feel,
and saying,
"This messy life is not my real life."
So what keeps us holding out for these perfect, comfortable lives
that we imagine?
And how can training your attention help address these habits?
There's an underlying story problem
built into the way we relate to our lives.
It feels like I'm a character navigating all these challenges
in order to get somewhere.
And this narrative structure is incredibly useful.
It helps me decide what's important.
It makes it possible to work towards and achieve goals.
But there's a problem.
My obstacles don't seem to be part of what I consider my actual life.
They feel like temporary annoyances that I have to push through
in order to get to what's on the other side.
But very often, it turns out
what's on the other side of my obstacles
ends up not being the relief I'm hoping for.
Am I the only one?
It ends up being another obstacle.
And I have a spoiler alert here.
This pattern keeps repeating and repeating,
and we end up waiting for,
habitually waiting for whatever's happening to pass.
And this dilemma scales all the way down to the moment-by-moment experience.
All these little looping stories
of waking up on time and trying to get to work
and going to a meeting and dealing with difficult people,
deciding what to eat.
And maybe the best we can do is sometimes comfort ourselves
with the idea of evenings and weekends and vacations.
Right?
But it's at this moment-by-moment scale
where the work of mindfulness occurs -
all these little places where we distract ourselves
and go onto auto pilot.
But mindfulness isn't a solution to your story problem.
So don't cancel your therapy appointment.
(Laughter)
It's not a narrative solution at all.
It's actually a solution
for the problem of living within these narrative constraints.
And any time that you habitually check out
starts to become an opportunity for checking in.
So let me give you a little exercise that you can use in any situation.
All you have to do is pause
to notice some sensory detail of your current experience.
Let's give this a quick spin.
For just a few seconds, what's it like to see?
That's right: it's easy.
What's it like to hear?
What's it like to notice some sensation in your body?
So that's probably the shortest exercise workout I've ever led.
But what I'm hoping to -
what I'm hoping you'll do
is compare it to what you already know about physical fitness.
One push-up's not very impressive.
It seems kind of trivial.
But we know that if we make a habit
and we do several push-ups a day,
over weeks we're going to start noticing more strength in our upper body.
So instead of trying to be mindful,
what if you tried to notice what's happening.
Every time you stop
and pay close attention to what's happening,
you disrupt that narrative,
that narrative of your life,
from inside your story.
Instead of trying to live in the moment,
what if you just started to sneak this kind of noticing into your routine?
When you take a shower,
what would it be like to actually feel the water hitting your body
or smell the shampoo?
What would it be like to taste your coffee?
What if you notice what it looks like to see the screen in your hand
and, once in a while, look up and see what's right in front of you?
Right?
Any activity that doesn't require much thinking will work for this.
And it turns out, there's a lot more of them than you realize
once you start looking.
And nobody needs to know that you're doing this.
In fact, I recommend you kind of keep it to yourself.
(Laughter)
I've kind of learned from experience that nobody wants to hear about
the relaxation you're savoring in your legs during a meeting.
(Laughter)
And the details you notice don't need to be pleasant.
What's it like to run late?
What's it like to be standing in the slowest line in the grocery store?
What's it like to watch your windshield wipers
as you're waiting for the light to turn green?
Your strategy for living in the present
will go a lot better
when you accept how frequently the present sucks.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So I've been describing a way to pay attention
in the midst of ordinary life.
But there's also a formal version of the practice you might be familiar,
where you pick something to notice over and over again
for a set amount of time.
So maybe 10 or 15 minutes,
you notice what it feels like to breathe.
You might notice what it's like to hear sounds around you.
And whenever you realize
that you've completely lost contact with that,
you just gently bring your attention back.
This timed practice
is what everybody thinks is the only thing that counts,
and I want to challenge this assumption.
The timed practice is intended - it's like going to the gym.
It supports your ability to be attentive throughout the rest of the day.
So you might notice relaxation during your timed practice
and then check in throughout the day
to see if there's something restful at all
that you can detect and savor.
So one time I was teaching a class,
and it wasn't a mindfulness class,
but it was the first night.
I get a phone call, and I had the start time wrong.
So I was late, and I didn't realize it.
There's a classroom full of people waiting across town for me.
So I spent this whole evening
toggling back and forth between the course content
and how rattled I felt.
My senses were heightened,
my face was hot,
my breath was shallow.
I felt embarrassed.
It was super vulnerable.
And over the next three weeks,
during my formal practice time,
it became about observing all the related feelings and thoughts.
And then throughout the day,
I would check in to notice,
can I detect any of those flavors emotionally?
And they were always there,
simmering on a back burner.
And I think people would be surprised to know
that if you saw me sitting every morning for those three weeks,
you would say, “Oh, he looks so relaxed.
He's not moving.
I want some of what he's having."
But inside, it was a total shit storm.
(Laughter)
And I wasn't doing it wrong.
This is what my embarrassment and the reverberations felt like.
I think people would also be surprised to discover
that the catharsis I felt during that time
was worth every moment
of turning towards that icky, garden-variety discomfort
instead of pushing it away.
The narrative mode of intention wasn't always our default.
Louise Glück says,
"We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory."
Noticing that you're alive
is a taste that adults have to reacquire.
People think they don't have time to practice paying attention
in the way I'm describing,
but I think what we really resist
is being willing to set aside our unresolved story problems,
even for a few seconds.
And I'm not advocating noticing every sensation all the time.
Instead of trying to put your story aside for even 15 minutes a day,
what would it be like if you limited your worrying
and your numbing and your unconsciousness
to 23 hours and 45 minutes?
(Laughter)
You don't have to try to be mindful.
You don't have to be relaxed.
Just by remembering to notice,
again and again,
that this messy life,
with its one obstacle after another,
really is your life,
and that it's possible to train your attention
so that you feel more at home,
both in your story
and in the direct experience of living.
Thank you.
(Applause)